eau de canonade

repeating "mostly, i want to be kind" in my head as a daily affirmation

Web Stuff

Week Ending August 7th, 2023

The number in italics indicates how many spots a name or title moved up or down from the previous week. Bolded names or titles weren’t on the list last week.

Green Screen - Special Effects in Good Omens

Chocolate Syrup Cake (1987)

i learned about this 17th century engraving depicting Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns is called "With a Thread".

The design turns out to be an image created with the help of ONE SINGLE LINE, which twists in a spiral.

All face details and light and shadow transitions are created from thickening this line. The author of the work is the French artist Claude Mellan.

To the artist's contemporaries, his engraving method remained a mystery, and no one was able to repeat it.

1x02 | 2x03

This is the funniest yet most accurate title I've ever seen about Hozier I'm losing my shit over here

You know. Some people could really stand to get more comfortable with the idea of “you shouldn’t say that because it’s mean”. Especially with really common body shaming and straight up bullying lines.

“You shouldn’t make ugly bald jokes because what if a transman on T sees it!”

“You shouldn’t make virgin jokes because what if someone who’s asexual sees it!”

How about you just don’t make them because they’re mean. How about people can be balding or a virgin for a number of reasons and also don’t deserve to be routinely made fun of. How about saying that the reason you shouldn’t make x joke because it spares x specific identity’s feelings also let’s them know that you actually have no problem saying or thinking bald people are ugly or virgins are stupid or etc but you’re just not saying it in front of them. How about you understand this kind of body shaming and bullying especially in a very public setting online are always going to have way more unintended damage to people who did nothing wrong than damage to the person you’re upset with.

Sometimes the best reason to not make a bad joke like that is because it’s fucking mean.

part of being an ally to trans men is not being a dick to cis men for their appearance btw

the short trans men hear you. the trans men with bottom growth—or who are post-phalloplasty—hear your bad jokes about small dicks. the trans men undergoing hrt who are losing their hair hear you talk shit about bald spots.

also, hot take, you should care about not hurting random cis men in addition to not hurting trans men. like just because some guy is being an asshole online doesn’t mean the thousands of young boys reading your comments about someone with their same acne deserved it. i don’t care what your reason is, even if you think someone is bad enough to warrant being bullied, who gave you permission to hurt the innocent bystander?

i'm a taylor swift centrist. she makes perfectly tolerable pop music that i can't imagine really getting into. dunno what it is about her that makes so many people go insane

i listen to one of these relatively bland and inoffensive but nonetheless well-crafted pop songs and everyone around me demands that i proclaim it a masterpiece or artistically bankrupt or whatever. i just want to grill for god's sake

The way that we learn about Helen Keller in school is an absolute outrage. We read “The Miracle Worker”- the miracle worker referring to her teacher; she’s not even the title character in her own story. The narrative about disabled people that we are comfortable with follows this format- “overcoming” disability. Disabled people as children. Helen Keller as an adult, though? She was a radical socialist, a fierce disability advocate, and a suffragette. There’s no reason she should not be considered a feminist icon, btw, and the fact that she isn’t is pure ableism- while other white feminists of that time were blatent racists, she was speaking out against Woodrew Wilson because of his vehement racism. She supported woman’s suffrage and birth control. She was an anti-war speaker. She was an initial donor to the NAACP. She spoke out about the causes of blindness- often disease caused by poverty and poor working conditions. She was so brave and outspoken that the FBI had a file on her because of all the trouble she caused.

Yet when we talk about her, it’s either the boring, inspiration porn story of her as a child and her heroic teacher, or as the punchline of ableist, misogynistic jokes. It’s not just offensive, it’s downright disgusting.

the reason the story stops once hellen keller learns to talk is no one wanted to listen to what she had to say

how’s that for a fucking punchline

Another part of the story that is often conveniently omitted is that Anne Sullivan, the “miracle worker” in question, was also a visually impaired woman (and abolitionist) who faced her own struggles finding accessible education. That was why she was able to teach Helen Keller and connect her with resources that would allow her to flourish in academia. When Helen Keller was railing against poverty-induced diseases that caused blindness, she was talking about things like trachoma which was what had caused her friend’s vision loss.

The fact that Sullivan is often portrayed as able-bodied in retellings of their story is indicative of the narrative that is most comfortable for an ableist society: that accessibility and equality are gifts bestowed upon the disabled by able-bodied heroes. Disabled children are never taught that they have the power to lift each other up, and that’s a crying shame.

I kinda love this detail that the coastguard always stops to talk to Mina! She's not from around there but he always takes time to talk to her.

He probably sees this girl sit there every day to look into the horizon so pensively, perhaps after another disappointment that there was no letter for her, and wants to make sure to give her a bit of a friendly talk.

#the most adorable newspaperman

forgot my night time garlic bread in the oven for the length of 2 mythbusters wpisodes and when i opened the oven door it was so thoroughly cremated that i was blinded not by smoke and ash but what surely must have been its Soul as well

forgot my night time garlic bread in the oven for the length of 2 mythbusters wpisodes and when i opened the oven door it was so thoroughly cremated that i was blinded not by smoke and ash but what surely must have been its Soul as well